The Digital Identity Big Bang

Thu, 2005-09-15 12:07.

Every website has parts of your personal information: your name, your address and phone number perhaps, and often your credit card number. Some allow you to send messages, some are just for checking your 401k balance. Many have information about you that you wish they didn’t have. And if you and I meet at a party tonight, it’s just about impossible for either of us to find each other again in cyberspace because, well, while Google is good at finding Amazon, it is very bad a finding you. Because there isn’t a place on the internet where you can be found. Digital Identity technologies intend to change all of this. Instead of having multiple personality disorder on-line, these technologies promise to give you a digital identity that is the same everywhere. Instead of having to update dozens of websites with your new address – if you can remember them all – you’d have to update it only once. Instead of being spammed or phished because somebody got a hold of your e-mail address and pretended to be somebody else, you could set your communications preferences once and technology would enforce it for everybody.